Recent studies and tallies have suggested that though the rosters of commercial galleries are not quite so exclusively dominated by white male artists as they were 30 years ago, the numbers are still very bad. Faced with a marketplace that seems to be in denial about its obsession with Great White Men, what can a conscientious dealer do? That’s precisely the question the participants in Professional Organization for Women in the Arts’s (POWarts) panel on Wednesday, July 19, will attempt to address.

The event brings together both rising and veteran women gallerists: Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, a director at powerhouse gallery Jack Shainman and the founder of We Buy Gold in Brooklyn; Cristin Tierney, the owner of the Chelsea gallery of the same name; and Wendy Olsoff, a co-founder of the long-running gallery PPOW. And though the panel’s title singles out gender equity as its central concern, expect race to also factor into the conversation. After all, the gross under-representations of women artists and artists of color on gallery rosters in New York and elsewhere are not isolated problems, but tightly intertwined. This panel won’t solve them, but it will keep important discussions about solving those problems moving forward and evolving.